Public Inquiries: Enchancing Public Trust (Statutory Inquiries Committee Report)

Baroness Sanderson of Welton Excerpts

Friday 25th April 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sanderson of Welton (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Bichard. He has just ably demonstrated why his Soham inquiry is so regularly cited as one of the best examples of how inquiries can effect real and far-reaching change.

I am afraid that today I am going to repeat the main points that everybody else has made—you can definitely see a theme here. It became very clear very quickly that the severe and biggest weakness in the inquiry system is the lack of any formal structure for monitoring. I have worked on and helped with inquiries over the years and it came as quite a surprise to me that I had not actually thought about this before.

I have been involved in trying to deliver inquiry recommendations, both the interim reports for IICSA and for Grenfell. That experience has taught me that it is really hard to get inquiry recommendations over the line. They span different departments, which means that it is very difficult to get people to take responsibility. It requires a political will and a political momentum. As has been said, inquiries take quite a long time, so the person who called the inquiry in the first place tends to have moved on.

Even when you get over those hurdles and to the point where you have delivered recommendations, you are then reliant on GOV.UK to communicate that to those affected. Frankly, GOV.UK is not up to the task. It is very dry, you cannot isolate or identify a recommendation that you might be interested in and see where it is in the process, and people just give up, frankly—and I do not really blame them.

When I was working in this area, we found a lot of complaints that it was taking too long, with people asking when it was going to get done, etcetera. They were completely justifiable complaints. We did not ever hear a doubt that it would get done; we just heard that it was taking too long. Something has changed in recent years. I do not know if that is because of the number of inquiries or the nature of the inquiries and the programmes they have led to, but what has undeniably happened is that we now have a backlog of undelivered recommendations across a range of inquiries. That is a problem.

As well, more recently, we are seeing a bit of a problem in that people are accepting recommendations because they want to show that they are accepting them. However, they accept in principle and they do not give any pathway or any sense of how these recommendations will be delivered.

Back to the victims and survivors affected, we are left with people losing trust in the process. I am hearing from people, “Well, what’s the point, because they’re never going to implement the recommendations anyway”. That really is a problem because, as others have said, public inquiries are expensive and long but are a hugely important part of our democratic process, because they step in when the worst thing has happened. They are there to find out what happened and to prevent it from happening again.

As our very able chair, my noble friend Lord Norton of Louth, said, the point is to not repeat the mistakes, but the problem is that if we are not implementing the recommendations, there is a danger that we are repeating the mistakes. In the territory of public inquiries, I am afraid that those mistakes are very often literally fatal mistakes.

As others have asked, I would be really grateful to hear what the Minister has to say about what they are looking at. There are other alternatives: there is Inquest and the national oversight mechanism, and there is the independent public advocate. But we need something in place to put right this wrong before it threatens trust in the whole system.